Alice Beasley

Alice Beasley (born 1945) is an African-American quilter and textile artist, and a former journalist and civil rights attorney.

Early life and education Alice Beasley was born in 1945, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Her family moved to Michigan when she was four years old; she grew up in Detroit.

Beasley attended Marygrove College in Detroit, earning a bachelor's degree in journalism in 1962. She worked for The Detroit News as an entertainment reporter.

Career Beasley started her own law firm with two friends after graduating from Berkeley. During her law career, she worked for the NAACP legal defense fund.

She began making art as a respite from her day job as an attorney. Myrtle Beach Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum, Los Medanos College, the California Heritage Museum, Rutgers University Art Museum, and abroad in Spain, France, Japan, Namibia, and Croatia. She has done commissions for the Richmond California Housing Authority, Stanford University, and the Highland Hospital in Oakland.

She is a Juried Artist Member at the Studio Art Quilt Associates, and a member of the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland.

Beasley is known for her appliqué quilts, which she creates using commercial and hand-printed fabrics. Much of her work contains social or political commentary. Thelton Henderson, Trayvon Martin, Barack Obama, the Rwandan Civil War, and the African-American women's suffrage movement, landscapes, and portraits from her imagination.

Personal life Beasley was married to Dave Cohn from 2007 until his death in 2016. She lives in Piedmont, California, near Oakland.